Cybersecurity: Ordinary People Need to Think About Cybercrime, Aura Says.

"Consumers buy lots of smart technology, but they aren't so smart about securing it.

Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received more than 800,000 complaints about cybercrimes from individuals and organizations, representing an estimated $10.3 billion in losses.

Hari Ravichandran, chief executive of Aura, wants families to take charge of their personal cybersecurity. The promise of Aura's monthly subscription model has made it a unicorn, with backers who include Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul who co-founded DreamWorks, and actor Robert Downey Jr., a hacking victim himself.

Ravichandran spoke with WSJ Pro about Aura's challenges, and how it uses artificial intelligence to make cybersecurity invisible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WSJ: How did you get interested in consumer cybersecurity?

A: In 2014, I think, I was applying for a home mortgage and it got rejected, which I was surprised by. My identity had gotten stolen and someone had set up a whole bunch of fake credit card accounts, etc. I had no idea. I spent the better part of two weeks looking around to see how this had happened, where exactly did the information leak from, had it affected the rest of my family? I couldn't make head or tail of what I needed to actually get to make the problem better.

WSJ: What is so hard about keeping your digital life secure?

A: With cybersecurity, people don't think about a lot of the basic views from which your data can get exploited. They'll use the same password, for example, over and over and over again. Multifactor authentication -- a lot of people don't turn that on. If there's a data breach, people don't necessarily go back and look at how this happened. This is almost akin in my mind to locking your door shut and leaving all your windows open.

WSJ: What's your vision for Aura?

A: It shouldn't take a lot of training for a family to go figure out how to keep themselves safe.

  The two most vulnerable populations we find within a family unit tend to be the elders and the younger [children].

WSJ: We are hearing a lot about how the bad guys can use AI to write better scam emails or to spoof our voices. How do you use AI to outsmart these kind of hacks?

A: When a scam happens, it's not a one-and-done event. It's like a sequence of stuff. In a grandparent scam, for example, somebody calls pretending to be your grandson or a granddaughter saying, "Hey, I've been kidnapped. Please, can you send $15,000 very quickly?"

The grandparent then actually goes to the bank. They withdraw the money, they actually send the money over. What we try to do with AI is find every one of these intersection points.

If it's a transaction where you're actually sending out a transaction from a bank account, can we monitor transactions and make sure that it's not off kilter? We use a fair amount of AI to detect sentiment in the voice, for example, categorizing something as a scam call or a real call. Same thing with the text messages.

WSJ: What are the challenges in getting consumers to change their behavior?

A: Building a brand, making sure they trust you. Your product has to be very easy to use and more than anything else, you want to be there when the person has the problem.

We get to market two different ways. One is direct-to-consumer, where you can go to the app store, download our app. Or go to aura.com and get the product through the web.

We also get to consumers through large companies as a benefit. A lot of CISOs are worried about the safety of their enterprise as it relates to people using devices at home. So we will work with these companies to offer our product up as a voluntary benefit that employees can sign up for during the open enrollment cycle.

Sometimes the enterprise will pay for it. Sometimes, they will tell the employee, "Hey, this is a good service to have from a safety standpoint for you and for our company."

WSJ: What kind of growth are you expecting for Aura?

A: Aura is growing at the moment about 50-ish percent, year on year. We're profitable, we're generating cash flows, we're growing fast. It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year." [1]

1. Cybersecurity: Ordinary People Need to Think About Cybercrime, Aura Says. Nash, Kim S. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 06 July 2023: B.4.